She stumbles upon the term while carousing at a local speakeasy, and urban farmer is indeed a perfect title to describe her unusual lifestyle. Novella may live in “the ghetto” of Oakland, California, but that doesn’t stop her from pursuing her agricultural dreams: from cultivating heirloom vegetables and fruit to keeping bees to raising poultry, rabbits, and even pigs.

The obstacles she encounters are uniquely urban. She must deal with teenage gang members, neighborhood dogs, and the not-so-minor detail that she is squatting on a vacant lot destined to one day be the site of condominiums. Her creative and resourceful solutions are urban, too. She picks weeds out of sidewalk cracks to feed the chickens, she raids the Chinatown dumpster for her pigs, she fashions pens out of objects discarded by the highway…